Sleeves & Collar

Next up with the redingote was the sleeves and collar. The sleeves are a pretty boring story, except:

1) I wasn’t sure whether to make a slightly elongated one-piece sleeve, or a shorter two-piece sleeve — I saw examples of both in Janet Arnold and Norah Waugh. I tried the one-piece first, but the portion below the elbow gets so weird, that I decided it would be easier to go two-piece. So I grabbed my pattern from the Maja dress and shortened it.

2) The cuff (and the collar) I’ve decided to make in black velvet, mostly because peering at the black pleated ribbon trim on the skirt makes me think black velvet ribbon. I suppose it could be taffeta, but this is what I’m going with! Anyway, the vertical stripes on the cuff are weird, and I had to play a bit to figure out number and positioning. Sewing those down wasn’t too annoying, but the binding SUCKED. I’m using pieces of white taffeta cut on the straight the way they would in the period, and hand sewing it down, and I even basted it… but no matter what, VELVET IS SO SQUIGY! AGH! The binding kept migrating so it’d be 3/8″ wide here and 5/8″ wide there and I had to unpick so many sections and resew them… what worked was 1) ironing the turn under, 2) ironing the point where the binding wraps over the edge of the cuff, 3) basting, and 4) unpicking/restitching over and over. LORDY.

For the collar (SQUEE I’ve always wanted to make a big ole redingote collar!), I started with the pattern from Norah Waugh’s Cut of Women’s Clothes. I’ve seen a number of redingotes in paintings with that extra triangular piece at the front of the collar, but I wasn’t sure about whether there should similarly be anything underneath the back of the collar. I tried experimenting with a few different shapes and they all looked dorky, given that the illustration doesn’t show a double collar over the shoulder. The collar looked so much like the one on this redingote:

Surprisingly, binding the collar was a piece of cake — possibly because I’d figured out the best way to approach it, or maybe because those curves made the velvet less squigy? No idea, but I’ll go with it!

I was originally thinking maybe I’d finish the collar separately and then whip stitch it to the finished robe neckline, but then decided that would be annoying. So I opened up the neckline seam, herringboned the collar to the robe fashion fabric, and still need to stitch the lining back in place.

Finished sleeves and cuffs.

Draping the collar, which I ended up making a little bit wider than this.